[HN Gopher] Xerox Star Keyboard
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Xerox Star Keyboard
Author : ZeljkoS
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-06-14 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (digibarn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (digibarn.com)
| azinman2 wrote:
| The keyboard key is very meta.
| loudthing wrote:
| It's weird they don't say what year its from. (AFAIK this
| keyboard mouse combo appeared in 1981).
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind that this is a subpage of a much larger segment of the
| digibarn site. The front page [1] reads, 'The Xerox 8010 (aka
| "Star") was introduced in 1981.'
|
| [1] https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/index.html
| cosmojg wrote:
| If only we were still seeing this kind of commercial innovation
| in computer interfaces. Where did it go?
| linspace wrote:
| There is no money in interface innovation. Certainly not for
| keyboards, over which only programmers obsses (me included).
| Most people is interested in how it looks at best, not in how
| effective it's going to be for typing or if they will be better
| to stay in the zone. We represent 0.1% of users (number totally
| fake).
| pinko wrote:
| Some would say AR is a commercial innovation in computer
| interfaces. (I'm not one of them, but I think it's worth
| mentioning...)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| A film from Xerox demonstrating the Xerox Star UI from back in
| the day:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE
|
| The Star was around $50,000 per additional workstation in today's
| dollars, although the 'starter kit' with a workstation,
| file/print/mail server, and laser printer that you had to
| purchase first ran around $240,000 in today's dollars.
| outworlder wrote:
| The keyboard has such a satisfying "clunk" sound. It puts my
| Cherry Blues to shame.
| kps wrote:
| Xerox soon replaced that keyboard due to European ergonomic
| standards; the newer low-profile was actually one of the
| first products to use Cherry MX switches.
| https://deskthority.net/wiki/Xerox_Star_low-profile_keyboard
| walrus01 wrote:
| imagine the workstation you could build today for $50k from
| x86-64 parts, probably a dual socket motherboard with a pair of
| $7000 xeons or epyc in it and 2TB+ of RAM.
| D13Fd wrote:
| All of those extra keys, and no left/right/up/down arrow keys.
| Crazy.
| NonNefarious wrote:
| But look, it has a Delete key AND a Backspace key... just every
| normal keyboard today. But inexplicably not the vast majority
| of Apple's.
| alexdbird wrote:
| Fn + backspace does this on every Apple keyboard. IMO it's
| gloriously consistent compared to the bizarre places that
| delete ends up on PC laptops and compact keyboards.
| kps wrote:
| The original Macintosh keyboard didn't have cursor keys either.
| You were expected to use the mouse.
|
| Star at least had the NEXT key to select the next item/field,
| rather than the horrible conflation with TAB that the Macintosh
| HIG and IBM CUA jointly saddled us with.
| ianbicking wrote:
| The AGAIN and SAME keys are interesting.
|
| I can imagine what AGAIN would do. Like if you pasted an image,
| AGAIN would paste the same image. But I imagine it applying to a
| deeply nested menu item or other control which might be hard to
| access over and over. At least that's what I imagine, it would be
| great to know how it was really intended to be used.
|
| SAME is provocative, but I can't quite figure out what it would
| do. Given a single selected object it might select all similar
| objects? Or given a text selection, show other instances of that
| text?
|
| On the right side, what does the KEYBOARD key do? I'm really at a
| loss on that one.
|
| On the enter key there's two symbols. Is that maybe to indicate
| that enter does CR/LF (next line, back to beginning), but with
| shift it just does CR (back to beginning of line)?
|
| There's COPY and MOVE, but no PASTE. I'm not sure if you do
| COPY+MOVE to do the modern cut/paste, or...?
| jkaptur wrote:
| Interestingly, the AGAIN command is still very much supported
| in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides (and, I believe, in MS Office as
| well).
|
| If you "redo" (ctrl-shift-z, or use the toolbar, or whatever)
| without having just "undone", the app performs the same action
| you just did on the new selection.
| layer8 wrote:
| AGAIN is like "." in Vim.
| kps wrote:
| SAME is a copy style/properties operation; it modifies the
| selection to have the properties of the target.
|
| AGAIN repeats the previous operation on the current (presumably
| new) selection.
|
| KEYBOARD brought up an on-screen keyboard for special
| characters.
|
| MOVE moved the current selection to the target location, and
| COPY duplicated the current selection at the target location.
| There was no invisible clipboard. [also previously edited into
| my comment below]
|
| See _The star user interface: an overview_ which is now happily
| free: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1500774.1500840
| ianbicking wrote:
| That was actually my only guess at what the KEYBOARD key did,
| but a virtual keyboard seemed so modern (and mobile phone
| inspired) that I dismissed the idea
| bombcar wrote:
| For those who don't know, Office has "Format Painter" which
| does this - select the text you want it to look like, select
| it, and then select the text to change.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/use-the-format-
| pa...
| chess_buster wrote:
| Apple Pages, too.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| The SAME key would make text "look the same".
|
| Found at: https://issuu.com/65c02/docs/50890515
|
| "You can select the object(s) to be changed, pus the SAME key,
| then designate the objects to use as the source. COPY
| PROPERTIES makes the selection look the "same" as the source.
| this is particularly useful in graphics editing. Frequently you
| will have a collection of lines and symbols whose appearance
| you want to be coordinated (all the same line width, share of
| grey, etc.). You can select all the objects to be changes, push
| SAME, and select a line or symbol having the desired
| appearance."
|
| And AGAIN does what you would mostly expect:
|
| "AGAIN repeats the last command(s) on a new selection. All the
| commands done since the last time a selection was made are
| repeated. this is useful when a short sequence of commands
| needs to be done on several different selections; for example,
| make several scattered words bold and italic in a larger font."
|
| "MOVE" is "cut" in modern lingo; I think that COPY/MOVE works
| in a way with "selections" in such a way that you don't need a
| "PASTE", but I can't really make it out from just that document
| (which I didn't read in full, I should add).
|
| No mention of the KEYBOARD key; can't think of anything that's
| supposed to do either.
| ianbicking wrote:
| It's interesting that AGAIN uses selections as checkpoints of
| a sort. I think that was probably the wrong idea as
| selections need to be made and remade to get them right, and
| so they aren't clear checkpoints, but interesting
| nevertheless. Though ignoring selections that you didn't act
| on might be sufficient to filter out those mistakes.
|
| The selection/target distinction is also another interesting
| path not taken. I encountered it in Oberon as well. I
| remember it feeling quite powerful, and yet I also was easily
| confused, like it was just a little too much to keep track
| of.
| kps wrote:
| The left function cluster replaced the chord set of Engelbart's
| NLS and the Alto, while retaining the same two-handed style of
| operation: mouse on the right to select the object, keys on the
| left to select the operation.
|
| Worth also noting that Star didn't use the Clipboard
| Cut/Copy/Paste (fragile invisible state) model, which _I think_
| came from Larry Tesler and certainly was popularized by the
| Macintosh. Instead it had the two operations MOVE, which moved
| the current selection to the target location, and COPY, which
| duplicated the current selection at the target location.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Move is a far better term than cut.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Move implies some atomicity, Cut is only the first phase of
| an operation that also involves zero to n Paste commands. And
| paste also combines with Copy for more variants.
| layer8 wrote:
| Not really, because you can paste multiple times from cut
| (except in Excel).
| dillera wrote:
| The DB alto is now in Baltimore, MD- and you can touch it!
| https://youtu.be/xoAkqEjnNK0?t=46
| ZeljkoS wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
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(page generated 2022-06-14 23:01 UTC)